People take England on trust, and repeat that Shakespeare is the
greatest of all authors. I have read him: there is nothing that
compares Racine or Corneille: his plays are unreadable, pitiful.
- Napoleon Bonaparte (Napoleon I),
in "The Coriscan," edited by R.M. Johnston

Nothing is more painful to me than the disdain with which people
treat second-rate authors, as if there were room only for the
first-raters.
- Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve,
in Hans Zinsser's "As I Remember Him," p. 8

Every author, however modest, keeps a most outrageous vanity
chained like a madman in the padded cell of his breast.
- Logan Pearsall Smith